This blog is written by Mike Hamlyn, Faculty Director for Teaching and Learning in the Faculty of Computing Engineering and Technology at Staffordshire University. It's for me to point to items of interest that I find, and for staff and students to share their comments

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

The survey of first year student opinions has now closed. Thanks to everyone who responded - we will be using the information gathered to improve our recruitment activity and welcome week for next year.

Monday, September 22, 2008

On 21st September 2008, the Sunday Times published it's annual University Guide. As well as its version of league tables (available here), they also provide a short summary of the institution - click here for more.

Friday, September 19, 2008

This is an extract of the league tables produced by the Guardian - I've shown the top of the table, the middle where we are (which shows an improvement from the previous year) and some of our obvious competitors.

The Guardian table is compiled using metrics for: teaching quality; feedback as assessed by students in the NSS; spending per student; staff-student ratio; job prospects; value added and entry qualifiactions.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Results of the national Student Survey have now been published - the responses are made by students completing their awards, unlike our own Viewfinder which is for students in earlier levels of awards. The results can be found at Unistats

Monday, September 15, 2008

Another video from the Higher Education Academy looks at student views on plagiarism. We didn't get time last week to cover this subject, but will run a sesion during the year on this very important topic.

One thing that came out of one of our awaydays was the need to engage with parents at open days. This was a very timely comment, as parents can have a huge impact on the choices that their children make. Some of the suggestions were that we should provide separate sessions for parents at open days, which could focus on the issues they are interested in, eg student finance and employability, while prospective students are shown around faciltities.

The Guardian published an article about the influences parents have on young adults, not just students, and describes how some organisations are dealing with this phenomenon.

Hi - thanks to everyone who atended the awaydays last week (one comment I had wa sthat we were not really "away", but at least we all spent some time away from our offices and labs!).

Feedback has ben generally really positive, and you've provided me with plenty of suggestions of other things you would like to see in future development sessions.

This week, as well as being around to welcome new students, I'll be compiling all the reponses you've given regarding Viewfinder. Once I've gone through them, I'll put together an action plan which I'll circulate.

This blog is written by Mike Hamlyn, Faculty Director for Teaching and Learning in the Faculty of Computing Engineering and Technology at Staffordshire University. It's for me to point to items fo interest that I find, and for staff and students to share their comments.